Factorio Dev Tracker

Inching closer to stable Klonan

The last 2 weeks have been less productive than we would like on the bug fixing front. The Easter festivities along with a wave of illness have dampened our efforts. We have still managed to push out 2 more experimental releases, and fixed a few desyncs. We encountered one specific desync in the mass MP stress test last weekend, caused by a characters inventory size changing (such as researching the toolbelt technology) while the player is respawning.

The graph of crashes paints a similar story to how the office atmosphere feels. It is natural though, most of the major crashes affecting most players are resolved, so all that remains are the more difficult issues that only affect a handful of players. This means that each bug fix is less effective at reducing the overall crash count.

This last weekend, we had over 500 total crashes repo...

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New Campaign Abregado

Have you ever been playing a Freeplay game and realised you don't know what your next big goal is? And then, once you decide to pick a new goal, you realise while you worked on automating the last goal, there were 10 new technologies unlocked and now you don't know which to pick next.

These are the situations we hope to address with the new full Campaign. A guided Freeplay, in which the player plays through the whole tech tree, without being overloaded with choice, while still having the permanence and unidirectional progression of Factorio. The permanence problem has already been solved using the new map expansion technique which is playable in the Introduction scenario. Over the last year we have been working on the bigger design task of unravelling the tech tree and breaking it into a set of choices for the player.

This task has been made al...

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Rail building changes kovarex

The problem with rail building is that it has too many states. It depends whether you start building the rail with shift, to use the ghost mode or not, and then it also matters whether you still hold shift, to ignore trees or not. Moving from manual building to ghost rail building means cancelling the whole rail building and starting it again with the correct modifier.

The problems were reaching the surface from time to time, and Twinsen even drew a nice little state diagram of the rail building system.

It kind of peaked with this bug report. After some time, it became clear that we should...

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Hello,

we are still focusing most of our resources towards fixing as many bugs as possible so we have stable release in reasonable time. In the meantime, the preparation for the continuation of the work on the GUI rewrite is still happening:

Character GUI mockup

The character screen is one of the most used GUI screens in the game, so we need to really try to do it right. We are moving towards the final version of the mockup, so we can start implementing it soon.

Crafting tab

Left frame

• (1) Inventory: We just translated the previous okay mechanics to the new style so we don’t add nor remove any important function.
• (2) Slots: Those are darker now in order to improve the contrast and readability of the icons.

Right frame

• (3) Panel tabs: The regular system of tabs takes quite some e...

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Removing RTL language translations Wheybags

I'm sorry to say that we have removed the RTL language translations (Hebrew and Arabic) in 0.17.20.

Until this point we've had a half implementation of RTL languages, where the text is simply flipped when we download it from Crowdin. This 'works' for a decent proportion of things, but not nearly 100%. In order to attain the level of polish we want for the 1.0 release, we would need to spend a lot of time implementing proper support for RTL layouts. This just doesn't make sense for us given our current goals, and the proportion of our player base which uses these languages (less than 0.1%). We decided that instead of completely gutting the translations, we could leave them in for those who enjoy them, but not to offer them in the GUI as defaults.

The languages will remain up on Crowdin, and the locale files will still be present in game, but there will be no option in the in-game language options dialog to cho...

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Hello,

This week has been non-eventful. We are fixing bugs. There is not much to say, and I have updated the graph to reflect the status of the ongoing Dev vs. Bug war:

The massive spike is the specific crash we talked about in the last FFF.

EGX Rezzed (Klonan)

We will be attending EGX Rezzed in 2 weeks. This week I have been finishing all the preparation work, such as furniture and equipment rental, accommodation, our itinerary etc. We will have a booth in the South Vault, with a couple of PCs for playing the game. If you are also attending be sure to pop by (We might have some free swa...

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A week in the office

This week is another week of typical bug fixing, so I thought we would make a one-time change of style and do a day-by-day account of what exactly that means for us.

Monday

We had a typical day of bug fixing for the most part. After our weekly Monday meeting, where we discuss the development plan and the Friday Facts plan, everyone settled into the normal bugfixing work, which boils down to something like this:

1. Find a bug to work on - Either by looking through the forum or the Automated crash reports.
2. Try to reproduce the problem, or someway figure out what went wrong.
3. Try to fix the problem. Sometimes this is super easy, other times it can be hours/days.
4. Check the solution is effective at fixing the bug.
5. Check the solution didn't break something else. For this we have over 1,300 integration tests which cover a large amount of the code base. We also have a server which runs tests for...

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Hello,

This past weekend we beat our previous record of most simultaneous players with a peak player count on Steam of 22,457 players, and no doubt another couple thousand playing the non-Steam version.

macOS Developer needed

We have a proportionate number of bug reports coming in for macOS systems, and we don't have a dedicated developer responsible for the problems. The Job listing is still up on our website, and we have the desk...

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The release (kovarex)

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So we finally released the 0.17 experimental this week. (patch notes) Hooray :)

Fun fact: The release script failed to post the release announcement on Steam and Reddit and we were wondering why. The reason is that the patch notes were so big, that it exceeded the maximum post size (40k characters). If this isn't the indication that we should split our releases into smaller chunks, than nothing is :).

Code wise, it is clearly the biggest release, and the amount of bugs we have to go through correlates with it. In other words, there are tons of bugs of all variety. We want to fix everything eventually, but it will take time, so we had to ...

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Playtesting (kovarex)

We have been playtesting a few days this week. There were some things we had to fix on the fly, but we still were able to play quite a lot, so I would say that it went surprisingly well. We have been able to get 3 multiplayer bases into a late game stage.

Tile pollution tweaks

As we played 3 different games already, we discovered that the tile pollution absorption values are quite weird. Water was actually absorbing more pollution than grass, which in combination with the fact that water heavy worlds have less biters and more choke points, makes it way too easy compared to a desert world. In addition, grass and sand pollution absorption was brought closer together, as the difference between desert world and grass world when it comes to bitter attack intensity was way too high.

Pollution absorb setting

In 0.16 one of the the map starting settings related to pollution is called Dissipation rate. Its tooltip says "Control how f...

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The release plan (kovarex)

This week was the time to close and finish all the things that will go to 0.17.0.

Not all of the things that we originally planned to be done were done (surprise), but we just left any non-essential stuff for later so we won't postpone the release any further. The plan is, that next week will be dedicated to the office playtesting and bugfixing. Many would argue, that we could just release instantly and let the players find the bugs for us, but we want to fix the most obvious problems in-house to avoid too many duplicate bug reports and chaos after the release. Also, some potential bugs, like save corruptions, are much more easily worked on in-house.

If the playtesting goes well, we will let you know next Friday, and if it is the case, we will aim to release the week starting 25th February.

After release plan

Since there are a lot of things we would like to do before we can call 0.17 good enough, we will simply ...

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